Atakapa

The Atakapa were an Indigenous people of the Gulf Coast who lived along the bayous, prairies and marshes of south-western Louisiana and south-eastern Texas. They called themselves Ishak, "the people", and spoke a language isolate also known as Atakapa. Their nation lost its central leadership in the mid-19th century, but families of Atakapa descent persisted, and several present-day groups trace their ancestry to them.

Atakapa is an outsiders' name, from a Choctaw or Mobilian term usually translated "eater of human flesh"; the French adopted it from the Choctaw. Historians today describe the custom it referred to as ritual cannibalism of slain enemy warriors in war, not a practice born of hunger. In the 17th century Atakapan-speaking bands held six river basins, from the San Jacinto and Trinity in Texas to the Calcasieu, Mermentau and Vermilion in Louisiana. Among them were the Akokisa around Galveston Bay, the Bidai inland in Texas, and the Eastern Atakapa of the Louisiana prairies.

Families spent summers on the coast and winters inland in villages of pole-and-thatch houses. Men hunted deer, bear and bison, by horse by the early 18th century, speared flounder by torchlight and took alligators, whose oil served for cooking, lamps and protection against mosquitoes. Women gathered lotus roots and seeds, a winter staple, along with nuts, berries, persimmons and prickly pear, and kept small plots of maize, beans and pumpkins. A tea of yaupon holly, the black drink, was used in ceremony. The Atakapa traded smoked fish, hides and salt with the Chitimacha, Caddo and Karankawa for pottery, flint and, later, European goods.

The first recorded contact came in November 1528: castaways from the Narváez expedition, among them Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, washed up on an island off the upper Texas coast. Lasting European contact began in the late 17th century, as the French pressed along the Gulf and Spanish expeditions came looking for La Salle's short-lived French colony. In the 18th century the Atakapa traded and allied with French Louisiana, and in 1731 helped the French and Caddo defend Natchitoches against a Natchez attack, though Atakapa women and children were also trafficked by Frenchmen at the post of Natchitoches. In 1760 an Eastern Atakapa chief sold land between the Vermilion River and Bayou Teche to a French settler. In 1771 a female leader, Quitachoulabenak, headed a community of about 500 near present-day Lafayette.

After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Atakapa communal lands passed rapidly to planters, often through disputed deeds. Smallpox, cholera and other diseases took a heavy toll, and when Chief Ló, the last recognised central leader, died around 1850, no successor was chosen. Many survivors joined the Caddo, Koasati and other neighbours. In 1885 Albert Gatschet recorded the language from speakers near Lake Charles, and in 1907–1908 John Swanton found nine fluent speakers in Calcasieu Parish; their notes became a dictionary published by the Smithsonian in 1932. The language has been extinct since the mid-20th century.

Recent scholars stress that the Atakapa did not simply vanish. Families kept an Indian identity even when census takers recorded them under other categories, and many moved to refinery towns such as Port Arthur and Beaumont in the 1920s and 1930s. Two Louisiana state-recognised tribes, the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe and the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, claim partial Atakapa descent, and several unrecognised heritage groups, including the Atakapa Ishak Nation, also identify as descendants.

Our maps for 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Atakapa territory along the Texas–Louisiana coast. On the 1650 map it borders the Tonkawa, the Caddo, the Natchez, the Chitimacha and the Lipan.